A Bevy of the Best

In his introduction to “The Best Short Stories of 1915,” Edward J. O’Brien asked: “Has the time not come at last to cease lamenting the pitiful gray shabbiness of American fiction?” The anthology was his answer. “It is my faith and hope that this annual volume of mine may do something toward disengaging the honest good from the meretricious mass of writing with which it is mingled.” The honest good that year included stories by Maxwell Struthers Burt, Newbold Noyes and Elsie Singmaster.

A century later, O’Brien’s project has spawned. Each October now brings a shelf full of Best American anthologies published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. A selection of essays began appearing in 1986, and has been followed by a steady flow of new categories, including sports writing (1991), mystery stories (1997), comics (2006) and, most recently, infographics (2013). Next year will welcome a science fiction and fantasy series.

O’Brien edited the short-story series until his death in 1941, at which time Martha Foley took the reins, which she held for 37 years. Since Foley’s tenure ended, a different guest editor has presided over “The Best American Short Stories” each year. This year it’s Jennifer Egan, who selected work by Joshua Ferris, Lauren Groff, Karen Russell and 17 others.

Egan writes in her introduction that “just about everyone who opens this book” could disagree with its selections. “Let us be enthusiastic about life around us and the work that is being done,” O’Brien wrote in 1915, even if years from now “a jury of novelists and critics will pronounce a very different verdict on American fiction from their verdict of today.”

Quotable

“I am working on lectures that will probably be included in my next essay collection. Gilead voices are still simmering in my mind. If one of them demands its book, I may well write it.” — Marilynne Robinson, in an interview with Vogue

An Earnest Press

This week, Robin Romm reviews Nell Zink’s “The Wallcreeper.” The novel, Zink’s first, is issued by Dorothy, a Publishing Project. The four-year-old independent press, based in St. Louis, publishes just two books a year, simultaneously every fall, and is dedicated, according to its website, to “works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women.”

In 2012, Danielle Dutton, who founded the press, told The Paris Review it was named after a great-aunt, “a mysterious spinster, who was a librarian, and every year on my birthday and on holidays, she would send me editions of children’s books, with rice or onion paper between the prints.” Dutton wanted the venture “to have this, sort of, earnestness” and thought “naming it after my aunt would keep it honest somehow. She was such an upstanding citizen.”